Before Rick Springfield realized that writing rock ’n’ roll hits such as “Jessie’s Girl” or “Don’t Talk To Strangers” was the faster track to fame and fortune, the Australian grade-school lad often put pencil to paper with a different dream in mind.

“I was writing short stories,” Springfield says. “I still have the first one I ever wrote, ‘Earth to the Moon,’ or some hideously derivative thing like that. They’re all titles like ‘The Thing in the Basement’ or ‘Scab-Man.’ I was a big horror fiction writer.”

But writing a song and playing guitar came easily, too, and it launched Springfield into stardom, first at home in Australia, and after moving to Los Angeles in the early ’70s, eventually in the United States, too.

But after writing his well-regarded 2010 autobiography, “Late, Late at Night,” Springfield, 64, found himself with a chance to pick up where he’d left off some 50 years or so ago.

“I saw I could finish a book, a whole book, and the publisher liked my voice and suggested I write fiction,” he says. “I’d thought about it before, but I was doing other things and I didn’t really have the focus. That gave me the focus to do it.”

On Friday, Springfield comes to Laguna Beach Books to sign copies of his debut novel, “Magnificent Vibration,” and play a few songs. Later that same night he and his band will play a full show at the Back Bay Amphitheatre, kicking off the Hyatt Regency Newport Beach summer concert series.

“Magnificent Vibration” is a fantastical comic mystery, the story of Horatio “Bobby” Cotton, divorced and down on his luck, when he discovers that the phone number on the inside cover of the self-help book he just shoplifted rings straight through to God. And not the serious straight-laced deity we know from Sunday School, this is God with a sense of humor and a bit of an attitude.

“It’s really funny, people’s reactions to it,” Springfield says. “Everyone has their own idea of God. Someone said the other day, ‘I don’t think God would say goddammit.’ I said, ‘I think God would laugh at your rules about him.”

Unlike many celebrities who use ghost writers, Springfield does his own writing. For the autobiography, his life provided the structure. For “Magnificent Vibration,” his imagination guided him from the general idea with which he started – “What would happen if someone had a phone number for God? What would the conversations be like?” – to the story that revealed itself as he wrote on.

“I just started with that first conversation,” he says. “That’s what made it so much fun writing, kind of letting it go its own way. I didn’t really force anything.”

In some ways, Springfield’s approach to fiction mirrors the way he writes songs.

“All the characters have a degree of truth in them,” he says. “I had to start with someone I recognized or something within me. I think the way to describe it is the chapters are like songs and the whole book is like an album. Writing something that’s hopefully cohesive but hopefully the individual chapters stand on their own too.”

“Magnificent Vibration” reached bookstores in May, and Springfield says he’s already close to finishing its sequel.

“I was interested in seeing where it would go and what would happen,” he says. “That was really the impetus, to see where it would go. And as out there as this one was I think it’s probably even more out there, the next one.”

For his Newport Beach gig, Springfield will open the Hyatt Regency’s summer concert series, playing a venue that’s new to him and which he says may result in a new kind of show for him.

“They have a severe dB limit and we’re actually a very loud band,” Springfield says. “Our show is hot and sweaty and loud and when they said what the dB limit is I said, ‘OK, I’ve got a solo show, too, I tell stories about the songs and it’s really a fun kind of two-hour thing.’

“And they said, ‘No, we want the full band version.’ I’ve never really tried that, but it’ll be an acoustic-electric kind of thing. It’s going to be very interesting.”

A week after he swings through Orange County he’ll be off on a run of summer shows with Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo, friends who also found stardom in the ’80s but until now have never toured together.

“Neil actually played guitar on the original recording of ‘Jessie’s Girl,’ too,” Springfield says. “We lived in the same town for a bunch of years and see each other. It’s kind of weird that it’s taken 30 years to get the tour together.”

In early August, he’ll return to Southern California to play Citizens Bank Arena in Ontario with Eddie Money and Little River Band. Later in the fall he’ll take his act home to Australia, where – as hard as it is to believe this – he’s never played as a solo artist.

“I have no idea,” Springfield says of why he’s never toured his native country. “We’d finish a tour and end up in Japan and I’d be, ‘I just want to go home.’ I’d be just wiped out. I think it’s a combination of that and just wanting to keep my home (of Australia) my home without doing the whole tour thing there.

“But three of my friends who were in bands with me there died this year. We’re getting older. So it’s time.”

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.

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